Love God And Do As You Please

I google mapped Ibiza this afternoon, remembering summers there in the early sixties. It seems the view from our house is as it always was, although its immediate surroundings are barely recognisable. It has become luxury accommodation of the highest order, so high, in fact, that no pictures of the house itself are directly viewable on google maps. 

Places may change but memories keep them as they always were, shaped by the times and circumstances when we knew them. The glitzy resort remains the primitive beach we once knew when we think of ourselves at that particular time.

The sixties in Ibiza were where the hedonism we see there today really started, or so we who knew it then like to think. Even so, it would have been hard to imagine the Salinas beach as it is today. Then, it was what its name suggests, salt flats fed from the lagoon adjoining the beach on which a single kiosco offered fried fish and a bottle of wine on most days of the week. Sometimes we slept there under the stars.

I don’t know if people are any happier on that beach now than they were when I knew it. I don’t remember feeling really happy there myself. But we were all determined to live the beach life and to construct a happiness out of that mercurial freedom which seemed to come with it. I do remember a small church in the little village near our house. Every time I passed this church I felt that the happiness I was working so hard to maintain was being drawn down into its coolness. It seemed to offer, or perhaps threaten to replace what I thought I had, with something different. What was disturbing about these moments, which happened every time I passed the church, was the feeling they left me with, that I was not altogether free and would not be free until I responded to its pull, its call. One of the reasons why I did not respond for a number of years was the fear that giving in to the pull would severely compromise what I took to be my freedom. 

Freedom can be understood in so many ways but, curiously, we do not really experience it until the moment we are prepared not to be free, until we are prepared to accept love and the consequences of loving in return. Love binds us to itself, but in a way which frees us to be happy. If this is true in human relationships, it is infinitely more true in a relationship with God. Accepting God’s love can only lead to our loving him in return, something I was not keen to do back in the early sixties in Ibiza. In this reciprocated love, as Saint Augustine wrote, we are free to do what we will, ‘for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the one who is beloved’.

So the beach years, or their equivalent, are really a kind of flight from a love which will pare us down to the point where all we can do is receive the love of God which leads to forgiveness and self acceptance. This is freedom. In this freedom, which at the same time binds us to God, we can do whatever makes us happy. There are no wrong choices, and therefore no failures, provided that our choices contribute to the greater happiness of others, and so please the one who gives us freedom in all its fullness.